SAGE Research Methods Caseeducation Submission for Consideration

SAGE Research Methods CaseEducation Submission for Consideration

Case Title

Oral History Interviewing: History in the Classroom in pre-war Britain

Author Name(s)

Patrick Brindle

Author Affiliation & Country of Affiliation

SAGE Publications, UK

Lead Author Email Address

Email:

Relevant Disciplines

[Click here to select discipline]General EducationClassroom Discipline and OrganizationCurriculum and ContentEarly Childhood EducationEducational Administration and LeadershipElementary EducationFoundations of EducationGifted and Talented EducationHigher EducationLearning TheoriesPreservice TrainingSchool CounselingSchool/Educational PsychologySecondary EducationSpecial and Inclusive EducationStaff Development and Professional LearningStudent AssessmentTeacher Assistants/SupportTeacher ResourcesTeaching Diverse StudentsTeaching Methods and Learning StylesTechnologyWorking with Parents, Families & Communities

Academic Level

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Contributor Biographies

Patrick Brindle completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1998, under the supervision of Dr Phil Gardner. After a few years on short-term teaching and research contracts at Cambridge, Patrick left academia to pursue a career in academic publishing. Following early stints at Pearson Education and Oxford University Press, Patrick joined SAGE in 2003 as Senior Editor for Research Methods. Patrick is now Publisher for Online Content at SAGE.

Published Articles

None

Abstract

In 1994 I embarked on a PhD study to examine, for the first time, what happened inside the classroom during history lessons in pre Second World War Britain. Previous studies had relied largely on a study of textbook content and official curricula guidance, without stopping to ask how and if such materials were actually used in pre-war schools themselves. My study looked at the textbooks and official curricula guidance, but also sought to get inside the classroom of the past by conducting oral history interviews with former pupils and teachers, and through a systematic review of the professional teaching press.

This case study provides an account of one practical aspect of a three-year-long PhD project, taking the reader to the heart of some specific situational and methodological problems that arose in the course of the research. The case sheds light on the particular challenges in using oral history interviews to elicit valid and reliable testimony about seemingly everyday and commonplace events in schools that took place more than sixty years prior to the interview. Thinking about such challenges leads to a more general consideration of the relationship between oral history methods and ‘traditional’ documentary methods in historical research. Particular attention is paid to the use of props as a method of aide-memoire, as a fruitful way of drawing out broader and deeper testimonies from interviewees.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the case,students should:

• Have a better understanding of the methodological challenges involved in using oral history interviews in a wider historical study;
• Understand the role of relationship-building in oral history interviews, and in particular the delicate interviewer/interviewee relationship;
• Be able to examine the role of props and aide-memoires in eliciting testimony about long-distant experiences;
• Be able to assess the pros and cons of oral history interviewing methods as a means of accessing the voice of the past.

Case Study

Project overview and context: Teaching History in pre-Second World War Britain

When I embarked on this study in 1994, most research into the history of History teaching had taken the textbooks of the past, along with official guidance on the curriculum, as unproblematic windows into how history was taught and how such teaching was received. Such accounts necessarily focused on such texts in terms of discourse or narrative, and examined (often effectively) how they sought to legitimise notions of Britishness, imperialism, race, class and gender. These accounts, I felt, were extremely valid in their own terms, and painted a picture of an official view of history that understood the subject as a mechanism to inculcate in children the values of imperial citizenship and conservative patriotism. But, at the same time, such accounts seemed to me to be flawed in methodological and historiographical terms because they ultimately failed to take scholarship into the realities of the classroom in past time.

Contemporary ‘in the classroom’ accounts are extremely rare. The educational historian Harold Silver (1992) was not wrong when he referred to the ‘silent social history of the classroom’. Snippets of class teaching can be found in popular social histories such as Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, but the only substantive academic study of History teaching in practice contemporaneous to my study was written by the American sociologist Olive Shropshire in her 1936 book The Teaching of History in English Schools. Beyond such fragmentary glimpses, historians have had to fall back on official reports and textbooks as their primary guide, or have taken, as I have, the path of using directed issue-specific oral history interviews to recover everyday classroom experiences from many years ago.

Most of the textbooks studied (and indeed published) were written for use in secondary schools. Yet in pre-war Britain secondary schooling was available only to an elite 6% of children, with 94% of British children prior to 1944 attending only an elementary school, and leaving school at the age of 14 without formal external qualifications. The great majority of elementary schools had no funds or access to history textbooks. To seek to capture what was a hidden history, I had to innovate, using alternative publications as guides to practice – sources such as the professional teaching press, school exercise books and popular histories. But my major source of information came from other people - from interviews with teachers and pupils who had experienced pre-war elementary history teaching first hand.

Together, the interviews and alternative sources took me inside classrooms characterised by large class sizes (up to 60 children per class in some instances) often made up of multi-age groups. History teaching here, as suggested by oral history interviews with former teachers, was most frequently cribbed together by a single generalist class teacher in the form of a story, culled from the teacher’s own school exercise books and other sources such as professional magazines and popular picture histories. In some cases the interviews also revealed how the ‘official’ narratives of history were countered and subverted by increasingly politically aware young teachers who were ill at ease with the conservativism and imperialism of the textbook versions of the national story.

Research practicalities

This PhD research project was carried out between October 1994 and November 1998. The work was supported by the ESRC and I was based at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The oral history interview fieldwork was conducted throughout 1995. The majority of the interviewees were in their 80s or 90s at the time, meaning that they had been pupils during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, and indicating that the teachers had taught largely in the 1930s, although a handful were old enough to have started their careers in the late 1920s.

The oral history interviews were designed to supplement existing written records and textbook sources, by digging into the largely unwritten and unrecorded everyday practice of class teaching in pre-war elementary schools. This oral testimony was in turn supplemented by personal written accounts gathered in the form of letters to the researcher. In this way the contemporary historian, in contrast to historians of more distant periods, can to some degree create their own archive in a manner similar to other social scientists. And it is just this involvement in the making of their own data that makes some mainstream documentary historians suspicious of the work of the oral historian.

By the same token, oral historians are obliged to develop a keen awareness of methodology, and a number of methodological challenges presented themselves as I set out to conduct the oral history interviews in this study. The main issuescould be summarised as follows:

Sampling: Put simply, how does one find a representative group of former teachers and pupils who might have credible and meaningful things to say about history in the classroom before the War? My strategy consisted of publishing letters in local newspapers around the country asking for recollections of history teaching before the War. This generated many hundreds of letters and led to my running 37 in-depth interviews with correspondents selected to represent the range of opinions expressed in the letters and the various types of contemporary elementary school.

Interview design: Oral history interviews, in contrast to life history interviews, do not seek to capture an entire life narrative of an interviewee; rather they are concerned to gather testimony relating to a particular issue or set of events. My study sought to examine an aspect of my interviewees’ lives that must have been relatively mundane or insignificant to them at the time and thereafter, and so methods were needed that would ensure the interviews got to the heart of my research questions in a meaningful and valid way. The issue of camera shyness or camera distortion would also need to be dealt with.

Access and withdrawal: The interviews were to be conducted in the interviewee’s own homes, and, it would transpire, the interview itself would often be an emotional experience for the interviewees, each of whom was asked to talk at length about recollections and experiences from many years before. For many interviewees living alone and often with high levels of social exclusion, the process of ending and withdrawing from the interview could be quite distressing. For some interviewees, ‘home’ meant a retirement home or sheltered housing,

Memory: The observation that memory is fallible is a commonsensical yet profound one. The challenge facing the oral history interviewer is how to create an interviewing environment that will enable that interviewer to dig beneath what might be well-rehearsed, or embellished or half-remembered accounts to something approaching an unvarnished account of everyday practice.

Research design

Like most historical studies, I sought to collect as much data as I could from as wide a variety of sources as possible, making this a mixed methods study, roughly speaking. As I have noted above, this meant drawing from existing sources such as textbooks, government reports, teaching journals and contemporaneous commentaries. Such are the primary sources of the historian. Indeed, unlike the social scientists, the historian does not generally have the luxury of bringing newdata into existence; neither can he or she expect to construct a research design with the kind of methodological purity that might be the goal of, say, experimental psychologists. On a fundamental level, historians are simply grateful for any data they can get their hands on. They are likely to smile ruefully in the face of the methodological and epistemological squabbles of social scientists arguing over the legitimacy of this or that methodological standpoint.

But contemporary historians - those researchers who seek to study the past that lies within the lifespan of those alive at the time of the research - can become social science researchers to a degree, and can seek to generate their own data by seeking out people who were around at the time. In this way, the contemporary historian can work towards filling the gaps left by the written record by asking questions directly to those involvein events that living memory can still reach.

Oral history or life history?

It is this direct questioning on a particular topic that marks out oral history methods from life history methods and made oral history methods the best fit within my research design. Many researchers conflate the terms oral history and life history, using the two methods to mean the same thing, but I saw them as distinctly different methodological approaches. Life history methods seek to enable individuals or groups to retell the story of their life. Such approaches seek to be as non-interventionist and as open-ended as possible, by allowing interviewees to start where they want to start and go where they want to go during the course of the interview. A good example of such an approach is to be found in Paul Thompson’s wonderful interviews with leading social researchers that are hosted by the U Data Archive (Thompson, P. and University of Essex. UK Data Archive. ESDS Qualidata, Pioneers of Qualitative Research, 1996-2007 [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], August 2011. SN: 6226, Those interviews, while targeted at Thompson’s interviewees’ research experience and methodological work, were much freer flowing in form,allowing interviewees to take their time and find their own path into the topic at hand.

Life history interviews encourage interviewees to set the agenda and to select those elements of a life story that the interviewee regards as being most significant. Such interviews can be very long indeed, and often involve the researcher returning for multiple interviews over dozens or even hundreds of hours.

Oral history interviews, by contrast, are much more targeted, and are designed to answer a particular research question and so the interviews themselves are designed to elicit testimony on a particular event or set of experiences. In my case, I was interested in History teaching in practice in the pre-war classroom. The problem I faced with this was that for my interviewees – the former elementary school teachers and pupils – history teaching and history lessons were a small and relatively insignificant part of their life story. Unlike secondary school teachers, elementary school teachers were generalists for whom history teaching was just a small fraction of the weekly curriculum. The contrast here with Thompson’s interviewees is instructive; in interviewing leading social researchers, Thompson could be confident that his interviewees would devote much time and attention to questions of method in social research because such issues were at the heart of their lives and identities.

The problem-focussed oral history interviewer normally seeks to arrange a larger number of interviews than their life history counterparts. This is partly a reflection of what is practical: oral history interviews can be shorter (mine ranged between 95 minutes in length and three and a half hours) while life history interviews are necessarily much longer as they seek to record a life in as much fullness as possible. But also the need to interrogate specific, seemingly minor issues from the lives of my interviewees necessitated talking to many more participants in order to build a more robust picture of what might have been happening. In my case, I conducted 37 oral history interviews.

Oral history interview in action

My challenge then was how to encourage my interviewees to focus their attention on what for all of them was only a small and seemingly insignificant part of their life. In some cases this was a straightforward task, as I could ask my interviewees a range of direct questions about what they could remember about teaching history before the war:

• “What first comes to mind when you think back about how you taught history?”
• “What can you remember of the first history lesson you taught?”
• “How did you prepare for your lessons?”
• “How did you know what to teach in history?”

Direct questions of this type were very effective with a handful of interviewees, but had limited effectiveness with the majority of others. Typically, such direct questions were good for eliciting 30 to 45 minutes of pertinent testimony, but their power on most occasions would fade. After perhaps half a dozen interviews of my relying on only on direct questioning, and getting testimony that was low on depth and detail, I discussed the problem with my PhD supervisor Phil Gardner. His suggestion was that I should look to use props as aide-memoires, and it soon transpired that this could have a transformative effect upon the quality of the interview and the breadth and depth of the data they could provide.

Props as aide-memoires in oral history interviewing

Having experienced half a dozen so-so interviews (and here the author should admit that his inexperience as an interviewer certainly contributed to some less than perfect early experiences) it was time to try out Phil Gardner’s advice, and to the next interview I took the following:

• A few examples of History textbooks from the time
• A couple of elementary school exercise books, sent to me following my call for letters and interviewees in the local press;
• A couple of secondary school exercise books, also sent in by post by correspondents;
• A collection of quotes from the letters sent to me by correspondents about their experience of history teaching;
• A handful of photocopies of photographs purportedly illustrating some aspect of history teaching in pre-war schools, such as children dressed up for an Empire Day pageant, taken from The Teacher’s World periodical between the wars.

My strategy initially was to use my props in a two-phase interview format. In the first phase I would ask my direct questions as before and I would leave my props safely concealed in my bag. During the half-time break for tea I would bring out my props and place them on the table for the interviewee to examine. I would then hope that, having seen the props, more memories would be triggered. This proved very effective, and enabled me to use the props to ask further direct questions such as: